Some results from my research in Ethiopia are now available, ahead of publication in African Studies Review. The paper, co-authored with Lucie Buffavand, is a product of several years work in the lower Omo valley, where a massive hydroelectric dam and sugar plantations are reshaping the landscape and people’s opportunities to live within it. We investigated the experience of people subjected to a campaign of ‘villagization’ – resettlement associated with the establishment of plantations on lands previously used for farming, herding, and foraging.

At the heart of the article is ethnographic work that Lucie carried out among the Bodi, who were the first people in the region to be displaced by plantations. These ethnographic data are juxtaposed with a survey of food insecurity that I coordinated in the villagization sites and in a community not yet subjected to villagization.

One of our main findings is that the food insecurity survey (which resembles the data that policy makers might use to evaluate the villagization scheme) fundamentally misrepresents the situation on the ground. In government-designed villages, people reported less intense food insecurity, but this was not because the techniques of irrigated agriculture they’d been introduced to were working, but rather because the government was giving them food aid to tide them over. The ethnographic data make it abundantly clear that food security in a broader sense – a sense of confidence about supporting oneself in the long term – was better in those communities still able to make a living from their herds, from rain-fed fields, and from river-bank cultivation.

Ethnography also sheds light on the texture of life in the villagization sites, including the disruption and the isolation that the move entailed. “Do our bodies know their ways?” is a question asked by a man who was struggling to make it in one of the new villages, and who chafed at the conditions imposed by the scheme’s architects. He lamented the loss of old routines. Small pleasures like drinking coffee with your friends take on new importance when the circumstances you live in make them impossible.

During a break from weeding, workers rig up a makeshift shelter and drink local beer.

The paper illustrates something I stress when I teach anthropological research methods, namely the value of using mixed methods. By holding the household survey data up to the light of ethnography, we got a better sense of what each represented than we would have done had we used one or the other method alone.

Since we carried out our research, things have gotten even more difficult for people in the lower Omo valley. In 2016, completion of the Gibe III dam led to the end of the annual flood that was the lifeblood of the region. Deprived of a reliable source of water for growing their crops, the Bodi and their neighbours are paying the costs of development, while others of us reap the benefits.